Library of Parliament (Ottawa)

The round, many-buttressed building tucked behind the Centre Block on Parliament Hill is the one part of Canada's original parliament that survived the fire of 1916 — and it survived because of a closed door. When flames swept through the Centre Block, the library clerk Michael MacCormac shut the library's iron doors, and the fire never reached the books. The rest of the complex had to be rebuilt; the library, apart from later repairs, is still the building the Victorians made.

It was designed by Thomas Fuller and Chilion Jones, and it borrows its idea from the circular Reading Room of the British Museum while wrapping it in the form of a Gothic chapter house. Construction started in 1859, stalled in 1861, and was only finished in 1876, when some 47,000 volumes were moved in. From the outside it reads as a lantern of stone ringed by sixteen flying buttresses, with carved friezes and floral ornament in the Victorian High Gothic manner and a copper-covered roof rising to a cupola.

Inside, the effect is of being inside a carved wooden drum. The galleries and walls are panelled in white pine worked into a riot of textures, flowers, grotesque masks and mythical beasts, and at the centre of the floor stands a white marble statue of Queen Victoria, carved by Marshall Wood in 1871. The building has had its own misfortunes: a fire that broke out in the cupola in 1952 did heavy damage through smoke and water, and between 2002 and 2006 a major conservation campaign repaired the woodwork and plaster and added the climate control the collection needs.

It is still a working library serving members of Parliament rather than a museum, which is part of its charm: a Victorian reading room that never stopped doing its job on the bluff above the Ottawa River.

Getting there

The Library of Parliament stands at the back of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill in central Ottawa; Hull, the old core of Gatineau, lies directly across the Ottawa River, under a kilometre away. The small Rockcliffe airfield (YRO) is about 6 km away but has no scheduled flights; the practical gateway is Ottawa Macdonald–Cartier International Airport (YOW), about 10 km south of downtown.